6 ms·

The biases and the resulting choices are determined by the developers and the uncontrolled part of the dataset (you can't curate everything), not the model. "Al

The biases and the resulting choices are determined by the developers and the uncontrolled part of the dataset (you can't curate everything), not the model. "Alignment" is a feel-good strawman invented by AI ethicists, as well as "harm" and many others. There are no spherical human values in vacuum to align the model with, they're simply projecting their own ones onto everyone else. Which is good as long as you agree with all of them.

astrange 1y ago
They aren't projecting their own desires onto the model. It's quite difficult to get the model to answer in a different way than basic liberalism because a) it's mostly correct b) that's the kind of person who helpfully answers questions on the internet. If you gave it another personality it wouldn't pass any benchmarks, because other political orientations either respond to questions with lies, threats, or calling you a pussy.
- orbital-decay 1y ago
  I'm not even saying biases are necessarily political, it can be anything. The entire post-training is basically projection of what developers want, and it works pretty well. Claude, Gemini, GPT all have engineered personalities controlled by dozens/hundreds of very particular internal metrics.
- lyu07282 1y ago
  I would imagine these models heavily bias towards western mainstream "authorative" literature, news and science not some random reddit threads, but the resulting mixture can really offend anybody, it just depends on the prompting, it's like a mirror that can really be deceptive. I'm not a liberal and I don't think it has a liberal bias. Knowledge about facts and history isn't an ideology. The right-wing is special, because to them it's not unlike a flat-earther reading a wikipedia article on Earth getting offended by it, to them it's objective reality itself they are constantly offended by. That's why Elon Musk needed to invent their own encyclopedia with all their contradictory nonsense.
- foxglacier 1y ago
  > it's mostly correct Wow. Surely you've wondered why almost no society anywhere ever had liberalism a much as western countries in the past half century or so? Maybe it's technology or maybe it's only mostly correct if you don't care about the existential risks it creates for the societies practicing it.
  - astrange 1y ago
    It's technology. Specifically communications technology.
    - foxglacier 11mo ago
      Since every culture now has access to communication technology, do you think liberalism is the right way for the whole world to behave? You want to eradicate all the illiberal cultures of people in poor countries and think that those people will be better off for it? Anyway, my point is that liberalism is certainly not obviously right and it's probably wrong in many places, maybe even in the west too but we don't know because any possible societal collapse would come in the future. Westerners are already suffering from something as shown by declining happiness and it's possible that's caused by liberalism. Not saying it is but it could be and it's arrogant to assume that LLMs believe it because they somehow know it's actually right.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - kortex 1y ago
    Counterpoint: Can you name a societal system that doesn't create or potentially create existential risks?
    - foxglacier 11mo ago
      Islam
- lynx97 1y ago
  I believe liberals are pretty good at being bad people, once they don't get what they want. I, personally, are prett disappointed about what I've heard uttered by liberals recently. I used to think they are "my people". Now I can't associate with 'em anymore.
- marknutter 1y ago
  What kind of liberalism are you talking about?
  - astrange 11mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias
mexicocitinluez 1y ago
So you went from "you can't curate everything" to "they're simply projecting their own ones onto everyone else". That's a pretty big leap in logic isn't it? That because you can't curate everythign, then by default, you're JUST curating your own views?
- orbital-decay 1y ago
  This comment assumes you're familiar with LLM training realities. Preference is transferred to the model in both pre and post training. Pretraining datasets are curated to an extent (implicit transfer), but they're simply too vast to be fully controlled, and need to be diverse, so you can't throw too much out or the model will be dumb. Post-training datasets and methods are precisely engineered to make the model useful and also steer it in the desired direction. So there are always two types of biases - one is picked up from the ocean of data, another (alignment training, data selection etc) is forced onto it.

astrange 1y ago

They aren't projecting their own desires onto the model. It's quite difficult to get the model to answer in a different way than basic liberalism because a) it's mostly correct b) that's the kind of person who helpfully answers questions on the internet. If you gave it another personality it wouldn't pass any benchmarks, because other political orientations either respond to questions with lies, threats, or calling you a pussy.

orbital-decay 1y ago
I'm not even saying biases are necessarily political, it can be anything. The entire post-training is basically projection of what developers want, and it works pretty well. Claude, Gemini, GPT all have engineered personalities controlled by dozens/hundreds of very particular internal metrics.
lyu07282 1y ago
I would imagine these models heavily bias towards western mainstream "authorative" literature, news and science not some random reddit threads, but the resulting mixture can really offend anybody, it just depends on the prompting, it's like a mirror that can really be deceptive. I'm not a liberal and I don't think it has a liberal bias. Knowledge about facts and history isn't an ideology. The right-wing is special, because to them it's not unlike a flat-earther reading a wikipedia article on Earth getting offended by it, to them it's objective reality itself they are constantly offended by. That's why Elon Musk needed to invent their own encyclopedia with all their contradictory nonsense.
foxglacier 1y ago
> it's mostly correct Wow. Surely you've wondered why almost no society anywhere ever had liberalism a much as western countries in the past half century or so? Maybe it's technology or maybe it's only mostly correct if you don't care about the existential risks it creates for the societies practicing it.
- astrange 1y ago
  It's technology. Specifically communications technology.
  - foxglacier 11mo ago
    Since every culture now has access to communication technology, do you think liberalism is the right way for the whole world to behave? You want to eradicate all the illiberal cultures of people in poor countries and think that those people will be better off for it? Anyway, my point is that liberalism is certainly not obviously right and it's probably wrong in many places, maybe even in the west too but we don't know because any possible societal collapse would come in the future. Westerners are already suffering from something as shown by declining happiness and it's possible that's caused by liberalism. Not saying it is but it could be and it's arrogant to assume that LLMs believe it because they somehow know it's actually right.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- kortex 1y ago
  Counterpoint: Can you name a societal system that doesn't create or potentially create existential risks?
  - foxglacier 11mo ago
    Islam
lynx97 1y ago
I believe liberals are pretty good at being bad people, once they don't get what they want. I, personally, are prett disappointed about what I've heard uttered by liberals recently. I used to think they are "my people". Now I can't associate with 'em anymore.
marknutter 1y ago
What kind of liberalism are you talking about?
- astrange 11mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias

mexicocitinluez 1y ago

So you went from "you can't curate everything" to "they're simply projecting their own ones onto everyone else". That's a pretty big leap in logic isn't it? That because you can't curate everythign, then by default, you're JUST curating your own views?

orbital-decay 1y ago
This comment assumes you're familiar with LLM training realities. Preference is transferred to the model in both pre and post training. Pretraining datasets are curated to an extent (implicit transfer), but they're simply too vast to be fully controlled, and need to be diverse, so you can't throw too much out or the model will be dumb. Post-training datasets and methods are precisely engineered to make the model useful and also steer it in the desired direction. So there are always two types of biases - one is picked up from the ocean of data, another (alignment training, data selection etc) is forced onto it.